'Waiting for Superman': A Missed Opportunity for Education

'Waiting for Superman': A Missed Opportunity for Education

What ‘Superman’ got wrong, point by point

by

Rick Ayers

While the education film Waiting For Superman
has moving profiles of students struggling to succeed under difficult
circumstances, it puts forward a sometimes misleading and other times
dishonest account of the roots of the problem and possible solutions.

The amped-up rhetoric of crisis and failure everywhere is being used
to promote business-model reforms that are destabilizing even in
successful schools and districts. A panel at NBC’s Education Nation Summit,
taking place in New York today and tomorrow, was originally titled
"Does Education Need a Katrina?" Such disgraceful rhetoric undermines
reasonable debate.

Let’s examine these issues, one by one:

*Waiting for Superman says that lack of money is not the problem in education.
Yet the exclusive charter schools featured in the film receive large private subsidies. Two-thirds of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone
funding comes from private sources, effectively making the charter
school he runs in the zone a highly resourced private school. Promise Academy
is in many ways an excellent school, but it is dishonest for the
filmmakers to say nothing about the funds it took to create it and the
extensive social supports including free medical care and counseling
provided by the zone.

In New Jersey, where
court decisions mandated similar programs, such as high quality
pre-kindergarten classes and extended school days and social services in
the poorest urban districts, achievement and graduation rates increased
while gaps started to close. But public funding for those programs is
now being cut and progress is being eroded. Money matters! Of course,
money will not solve all problems (because the problems are more
systemic than the resources of any given school) – but the off-handed
rejection of a discussion of resources is misleading.

*Waiting for Superman implies that standardized testing is a reasonable way to assess student progress.
The debate of “how to raise test scores” strangles and distorts strong
education. Most test score differences stubbornly continue to reflect
parental income and neighborhood/zip codes, not what schools do. As
opportunity, health and family wealth increase, so do test scores.
This is not the fault of schools but the inaccuracy, and the internal bias, in the tests themselves.

Moreover, the tests are too narrow (on only certain subjects with
only certain measurement tools). When schools focus exclusively on
boosting scores on standardized tests, they reduce teachers to test-prep
clerks, ignore important subject areas and critical thinking skills,
dumb down the curriculum and leave children less prepared for the
future. We need much more authentic assessment to know if schools are
doing well and to help them improve.

*Waiting for Superman ignores overall problems of poverty.
Schools must be made into sites of opportunity, not places for the
rejection and failure of millions of African American, Chicano Latino,
Native American, and immigrant students. But schools and teachers take
the blame for huge social inequities in housing, health care, and
income.

Income disparities between the richest and poorest in U.S.society
have reached record levels between 1970 and today. Poor communities
suffer extensive traumas and dislocations. Homelessness, the
exploitation of immigrants, and the closing of community health and
counseling clinics, are all factors that penetrate our school
communities. Solutions that punish schools without addressing these
conditions only increase the marginalization of poor children.

*Waiting for Superman says teachers’ unions are the problem.
Of course unions need to be improved – more transparent, more
accountable, more democratic and participatory – but before teachers
unionized, the disparity in pay between men and women was disgraceful
and the arbitrary power of school boards to dismiss teachers or raise
class size without any resistance was endemic.

Unions have historically played leading roles in improving public
education, and most nations with strong public educational systems have
strong teacher unions.

According to this piece in The Nation,
"In the Finnish education system, much cited in the film as the best in
the world, teachers are – gasp! – unionized and granted tenure, and
families benefit from a cradle-to-grave social welfare system that
includes universal daycare, preschool and health care, all of which are
proven to help children achieve better results in school."

In fact, even student teachers have a union in Finland and, overall, nearly 90% of the Finnish labor force is unionized.

*Waiting for Superman says teacher education is useless.
The movie touts the benefits of fast track and direct entry to teaching programs such as Teach for America, but the country with the highest achieving students, Finland, also has highly educated teachers.

A 1970 reform of Finland’s education system mandated that all
teachers above the kindergarten level have at least a master’s degree.
Today that country’s students have the highest math and science
literacy, as measured by the Program for International Student
Assessment (PISA), of all the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries.

*Waiting for Superman decries tenure as a drag on teacher improvement.
Tenured teachers cannot be fired without due process and a good reason:
they can’t be fired because the boss wants to hire his cousin, or
because the teacher is gay (or black or…), or because they take an
unpopular position on a public issue outside of school.

A recent survey found that most principals agreed that they had the
authority to fire a teacher if they needed to take such action. It is
interesting to note that when teachers are evaluated through a
union-sanctioned peer process, more teachers are put into retraining
programs and dismissed than through administration-only review programs.
Overwhelmingly teachers want students to have outstanding and positive
experiences in schools.

*Waiting for Superman says charter schools allow choice and better educational innovation.
Charters were first proposed by the teachers’ unions to allow committed
parents and teachers to create schools that were free of administrative
bureaucracy and open to experimentation and innovation, and some
excellent charters have set examples. But thousands of hustlers and
snake oil salesmen have also jumped in.

While teacher unions are vilified in the film, there is no mention of charter corruption or profiteering. A recent national study by CREDO,
The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University,
concludes that only 17% of charter schools have better test scores than
traditional public schools, 46% had gains that were no different than
their public counterparts, and 37% were significantly worse.

While a better measure of school success is needed, even by their own measure, the project has not succeeded. A recent Mathematica Policy Research study came to similar conclusions. And the Education Report, "The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts,
concludes, “On average, charter middle schools that hold lotteries are
neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in
improving student achievement, behavior, and school progress.”

Some fantastic education is happening in charter schools, especially
those initiated by communities and led by teachers and community
members. But the use of charters as a battering ram for those who would
outsource and privatize education in the name of “reform” is sheer
political opportunism.

*Waiting for Superman glorifies lotteries for admission to highly selective and subsidized charter schools as evidence of the need for more of them.
If we understand education as a civil right, even a human right as defined by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, we know it can’t be distributed by a lottery.

We must guarantee all students access to high quality early
education, highly effective teachers, college and work-preparatory
curricula and equitable instructional resources like good school
libraries and small classes. A right without a clear map of what that
right protects is an empty statement.

It is not a sustainable public policy to allow more and more public
school funding to be diverted to privately subsidized charters while
public schools become the schools of last resort for children with the
greatest educational needs. In Waiting for Superman, families
are cruelly paraded in front of the cameras as they wait for an
admission lottery in an auditorium where the winners’ names are pulled
from a hat and read aloud, while the losing families trudge out in tears
with cameras looming in their faces – in what amounts to family and
child abuse.

*Waiting for Superman says competition is the best way to improve learning.
Too many people involved in education policy are dazzled by the idea of
“market forces” improving schools. By setting up systems of competition,
Social Darwinist struggles between students, between teachers, and
between schools, these education policy wonks are distorting the
educational process.

Teachers will be motivated to gather the most promising students, to
hide curriculum strategies from peers, and to cheat; principals have
already been caught cheating in a desperate attempt to boost test
scores. And children are worn out in a sink-or-swim atmosphere that
threatens them with dire life outcomes if they are not climbing to the
top of the heap.

In spite of the many millions of dollars poured into expounding the
theory of paying teachers for higher student test scores (sometimes
mislabeled as ‘merit pay’), a new study by Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Incentives
found that the use of merit pay for teachers in the Nashville school
district produced no difference even according to their measure, test
outcomes for students.

*Waiting for Superman says good teachers are key to
successful education. We agree. But Waiting for Superman only
contributes to the teacher-bashing culture which discourages talented
college graduates from considering teaching and drives people out of the
profession.

According to the Department of Education, the country will need 1.6
million new teachers in the next five years. Retention of talented
teachers is one key. Good teaching is about making connections to
students, about connecting what they learn to the world in which they
live, and this only happens if teachers have history and roots in the
communities where they teach.

But a recent report by the nonprofit National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future
says that “approximately a third of America’s new teachers leave
teaching sometime during their first three years of teaching; almost
half leave during the first five years. In many cases, keeping our
schools supplied with qualified teachers is comparable to trying to fill
a bucket with a huge hole in the bottom.”

*Waiting for Superman says “we’re not producing large
numbers of scientists and doctors in this country anymore. . . This
means we are not only less educated, but also less economically
competitive.”

But Business Week (10/28/09) reported that
“U.S. colleges and universities are graduating as many scientists and
engineers as ever,” yet “the highest performing students are choosing
careers in other fields.” In particular, the study found, “many of the
top students have been lured to careers in finance and consulting.” It’s
the market, and the disproportionately high salaries paid to finance
specialists, that is misdirecting human resources, not schools.

*Waiting for Superman promotes a nutty theory of learning which claims that teaching is a matter of pouring information into children’s heads.
In one of its many little cartoon segments, the film purports to show
how kids learn. The top of a child’s head is cut open and a jumble of
factoids is poured in. Ouch! Oh, and then the evil teacher union and
regulations stop this productive pouring project.

The film-makers betray a lack of understanding of how people actually
learn, the active and engaged participation of students in the learning
process. They ignore the social construction of knowledge, the
difference between deep learning and rote memorization.

The movie would have done a service by showing us what excellent
teaching looks like, and addressing the valuable role that teacher
education plays in preparing educators to practice the kind of targeted
teaching that reaches all students. It should have let teachers’ voices
be heard.

*Waiting for Superman promotes the idea that we are in a dire war for US dominance in the world.
The poster advertising the film shows a nightmarish battlefield in
stark gray, with a little white girl sitting at a desk in the midst of
it. The text: “The fate of our country won’t be decided on a
battlefield. It will be determined in a classroom.”

This is a common theme of the so-called reformers: We are at war with
India and China and we have to out-math them and crush them so that we
can remain rich and they can stay in the sweatshops.

But really, who declared this war? When did I as a teacher sign up
as an officer in this war? And when did that 4th grade girl become a
soldier in it? Instead of this new educational Cold War, perhaps we
should be helping kids imagine a world of global cooperation,
sustainable economies, and equity.

*Waiting for Superman says federal “Race to the Top” education funds are being focused to support students who are not being served in other ways.
According to a study
by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and others, Race to the Top funds
are benefiting affluent or well-to-do, white, and “abled” students. So the outcome of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top has been more funding for schools that are doing well and more discipline and narrow test-preparation for the poorest schools.

*Waiting for Superman suggests that teacher improvement is a matter of increased control and discipline over teachers.
Dan Brown, a teacher in the SEED charter school
featured in the film, points out that successful schools involve
teachers in strong collegial conversations. Teachers need to be
accountable to a strong educational plan, without being terrorized. Good
teachers, which is the vast majority of them, are seeking this kind of support from their leaders.

*Waiting for Superman proposes a reform “solution”
that exploits the feminization of the field of teaching; it proposes
that teachers just need a few good men with hedge funds (plus D.C.
Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee with a broom) to come to the rescue.
Teaching has been historically devalued – teachers are less well
compensated and have less control of their working conditions than other
professionals – because of its associations with women.

For example, 97% of preschool and kindergarten teachers are women,
and this is also the least well-compensated sector of teaching; in 2009, the lowest 10% earned
$30,970 to $34,280; the top 10% earned $75,190 to $80,970. () By
comparison the top 25 hedge fund managers took in $25 billion in 2009,
enough to hire 658,000 new teachers.

--

Waiting for Superman could and should have been an inspiring call for improvement in education, a call we desperately need to mobilize behind.

That’s why it is so shocking that the message was hijacked by a
narrow agenda that undermines strong education. It is stuck in a
framework that says that reform and leadership means doing things, like
firing a bunch of people (Rhee) or “turning around” schools (Education
Secretary Arne Duncan) despite the fact that there’s no research to
suggest that these would have worked, and there’s now evidence to show
that they haven’t.

Reform must be guided by community empowerment and strong evidence,
not by ideological warriors or romanticized images of leaders acting
like they’re doing something, anything. Waiting for Superman
has ignored deep historical and systemic problems in education such as
segregation, property-tax based funding formulas, centralized textbook
production, lack of local autonomy and shared governance,
de-professionalization, inadequate special education supports,
differential discipline patterns, and the list goes on and on.

People seeing Waiting for Superman should be mobilized to
improve education. They just need to be willing to think outside of the
narrow box that the film-makers have constructed to define what needs
to be done.

Rick Ayers is
a former high school teacher, founder of Communication Arts and
Sciences small school at Berkeley High School, and currently adjunct
professor in teacher education at the University of San Francisco. He is
the co-author, with his brother William Ayers, of the forthcoming
"Teaching the Taboo" from Teachers College Press.

Further

Academics are increasingly, ingeniously fighting back against an Orwellian "Professor Watchlist" aimed at exposing "radical" teachers. The list has inspired online trolls to name their own suspects - Albus Dumbledore, Dr. Pepper, Mr. Spock - and a Watchlist Redux to honor not trash targets from Jesus to teachers daring to "think critically about power." Now 100 Notre Dame professors have asked to join the list in solidarity, proclaiming, "We wish to be counted among those you are watching."